Alyssa Norton’s latest body of work is closely inspired by the landscapes around her. Drawing on local flora as well as the contours and connections of land and sky, Norton investigates the impermanence and transmutability of both the natural world and human existence. Having originally trained in painting at Cornell University and the Instituto Allende in Mexico, this body of work marks a return to the discipline after several years dedicated to her celebrated jewellery practice.

Norton’s work hovers between image and object, stasis and motion, concealment and revelation. Her pieces incorporate dried flowers, preserved by coating them in many layers of paint until their original forms reach a point of abstraction. Through this process, the flowers begin to resemble bone, creating a tension between aliveness and inertia that reminds us of the paradoxical centrality of death and decay to all life. The works further draw on the cultural symbolism of cut flowers, exchanged as markers of milestones from birth to the grave.

Like these appliquéd flower works, Norton’s landscape pieces exhibit a similar textural three-dimensionality. Formed from layers of painted strips of paper alongside dyed silk and coloured pencil on watercolour paper, sections are glued, sewn, and torn in a dynamic process of covering and uncovering. The resulting works are simultaneously abstract and representational, suggesting both internal and external landscapes and inviting the viewer to consider the transformative power of colour.